Fun with a SQLExpress 2005 upgrade 2008

On my development PC I had a 2005 instance of SQLExpress that was installed as part of the VS2008 setup. I thought I had upgraded it when I put on the SQL 2008 Management tools and/or VS2010 beta, but it seems I didn’t. I thought I would try the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer, but this also thought I had done the upgrade to 2008, I suspect due to the fact I had the 2008 management tools.

Note: If you are using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 RC remember you can’t just click on it to run from the web if you are running as a non-administrator user on your PC (as you should be, running least privilege). You need to download it and ‘run it is administrator’ or open it in a browser running as administrator to get it t even load.

So I needed to download the SQLExpress 2008 media to do a manual upgrade, as I remembered I could not use the developer edition media I had to hand to upgrade and Express instance. This download in itself proved problematic. I did a downloaded from MSDN, but the file I got gave a ‘not a valid win32’ error when I tried to run it. Also I noticed each time I tried to download it in IE8 it was a different size – not a good sign! Once I swapped to Firefox it downloaded without issue.

Anyway in the end I got the right media and access rights and the upgraded went smoothly. However then I tried to attach a 2008 DB (the reason I needed the upgrade in the first place) I got the error

Parameter name: nColIndex
Actual value was -1. (Microsoft.SqlServer.GridControl)

I had yet again forgotten to run SQL Management Studio as an administrative user. This error dialog is SQL Management Studio was of saying you don’t have the rights!

Read the complete post at http://blogs.blackmarble.co.uk/blogs/rfennell/archive/2009/07/06/fun-with-a-sqlexpress-2005-upgrade-2008.aspx